WEEKEND VIDEO / A FAVORITE FROM 15 YEARS AGO
“Stay (I Missed You)” |
August 1, 1994:
Lisa Loeb looks like the kind of girl whom boys picked on in fourth grade. She wears big, goofy tortoise-shell glasses; her knees knock and she has a tendency to stand pigeon-toed. But right now, Loeb, 26, is as popular as any girl could dream to be. Her hit song “Stay,” a folky bit of fluff from the Reality Bites soundtrack, is No. 2 on Billboard’s singles chart and has sold more than 500,000 copies. And the video, running in heavy rotation on MTV, is directed by cute Reality Bites star Ethan Hawke.
Geekiness is actually the secret to Loeb’s appeal. A Dallas-born singer-guitarist who spent the last few years struggling in New York folk clubs, Loeb landed on the Reality Bites soundtrack out of nowhere. She had no record contract, no manager, no following to speak of — except, that is, for Hawke, a Greenwich Village neighbor who recommended her for the slot. (She is on the verge of a deal with Geffen.) “Stay” has struck a chord with the MTV audience that the desperate-to-be-hip film ironically missed. An ode to a botched relationship, the song, written by Loeb, uses the tangled language of adolescence: it’s full of lines like “The lover’s in love, and the other’s run away” and “I think that I am throwing, but I’m thrown.” The lyrics may be amateurish, but Loeb’s voice is pretty, with an air of hesitant fragility, and the production has an uncluttered acoustic ease.
Yet it’s visually that Loeb makes her greatest impact. In the video for “Stay,” she is wandering around an empty loft apartment, flailing her arms and biting her lip and acting as though she could fall apart at any second. Like the MTV veejay Kennedy, who has a similarly wacko on-screen persona (as well as the manic hairdo and kooky glasses), Loeb flaunts her geekiness for all it is worth. Most people don’t like to admit it when they feel awkward or clumsy; Loeb and Kennedy seem to thrive on it.